Establishing IUCN Red List Criteria for Threatened Ecosystems

The potential for conservation of individual species has been greatly advanced by the International Union for Conservation of Nature\u27s (IUCN) development of objective, repeatable, and transparent criteria for assessing extinction risk that explicitly separate risk assessment from priority setting. At the IV World Conservation Congress in 2008, the process began to develop and implement comparable global standards for ecosystems. A working group established by the IUCN has begun formulating a system of quantitative categories and criteria, analogous to those used for species, for assigning levels of threat to ecosystems at local, regional, and global levels. A final system will require definitions of ecosystems; quantification of ecosystem status; identification of the stages of degradation and loss of ecosystems; proxy measures of risk (criteria); classification thresholds for these criteria; and standardized methods for performing assessments. The system will need to reflect the degree and rate of change in an ecosystem\u27s extent, composition, structure, and function, and have its conceptual roots in ecological theory and empirical research. On the basis of these requirements and the hypothesis that ecosystem risk is a function of the risk of its component species, we propose a set of four criteria: recent declines in distribution or ecological function, historical total loss in distribution or ecological function, small distribution combined with decline, or very small distribution. Most work has focused on terrestrial ecosystems, but comparable thresholds and criteria for freshwater and marine ecosystems are also needed. These are the first steps in an international consultation process that will lead to a unified proposal to be presented at the next World Conservation Congress in 2012

Visitor segmentation for a park system using research and managerial judgement

Visitors to parks and protected areas are not a homogeneous group. Therefore, it is important for managers of such areas to have an understanding of the diversity of these visitors. One technique applied to understanding the diversity of visitors is segmentation whereby visitors are clustered based on variables of interest. Through a partnership of university-based and protected area agency researchers, this study segmented visitors to 33 parks across the Western Australian protected area estate. Using both psychographic and behavioural variables, four clusters were identified and these were subsequently discussed and validated with agency staff. These discussions identified opportunities for using the segmentation results to inform park and site planning and for marketing and potential re-distribution of supply and demand across the park system to better match visitor needs and the management resources available. Collaborative research efforts such as these, including validation by managers, can contribute to robust findings with a greater chance of being adopted by protected area agencies

Bittersweet? Urban proximity and wine tourism in the Swan Valley Region

© 2018 Elsevier Ltd Proximity to the target market is deemed desirable for tourism destinations, including wine-tourism. Yet, it also translates into a range of problems. While research into wine regions has exponentially grown over the last two decades, the majority of research in wine tourism focuses on the demand side with little attention to supply side dynamics that impact development. This paper considers the realities of the supply side of a wine tourism region, i.e. the perspectives of business owners, service providers and authorities, and reports on the perceptions and challenges as noted by a range of stakeholders in the Swan Valley in Western Australia as a distinct wine tourism area. The study highlights how proximity to an urban market can be a major challenge for an industry based on agri-business in a rural setting. The research has policy implications for local and state authorities, particularly in terms of alignment relating to land-use and infrastructure

Investigating the impact of catchment areas of airports on estimating air travel demand: A case study of regional Western Australia

© 2018 Elsevier Ltd The aviation industry in Western Australia (WA) plays a vital role in the economic and social development of the state. However, accurate forecasts for passenger movements are not available to policy makers due to lack of relevant air travel demand information. The objective of this study is to estimate the domestic air passenger seat numbers between airport-pairs based on online flight information in regional WA based on a gravity model using Poisson pseudo-maximum likelihood estimation (PPML). Particularly, we aim to investigate the impact of distance, airfare, catchment areas, population, tourism and mining sector on forecasting air passenger seat numbers in order to inform and guide policy making. This research collected appropriate data and produced valid models that represent air passenger seat numbers offered on regular public transport (RPT) air services in regional WA. The models consider both geographic and service-related variables, such as the catchment area of airports, population and number of tourists in the airport's catchment area. Two kinds of airport catchment areas are generated in this study, based on Thiessen polygon and two and half hours’ driving distance. The Thiessen polygon catchment areas cover the whole WA regions, while the 2.5 h's driving catchment area covers only 32 percent of the WA region. The size of the catchment area can affect the magnitude of factors, and therefore influence the modelling results. When deciding the catchment area for the study, it is important to take the spatial distribution of factors into considerations. For both Thiessen polygon and two and half hours’ driving distance catchment area, the model results illustrate that distance between airports, airfare of the flight, population of the origin airport's catchment area and the number of operating mine sites of the destination airport's catchment area are significantly correlated with domestic air travel seat capacity provided. Given the guidance from policy documents and policy makers, the results will improve the understanding of the key parameters of regional passenger aviation services and help to guide policy makers considering regional passenger aviation issues. The outcome of this study would be useful for and guide policy development